The following article is dedicated to TRADING ON THE BETFAIR WEBSITE, as opposed to using a dedicated trading software.

While Tennis Trading League is pretty much aimed at gathering profits quickly using a dedicated Betfair Platform (in our case FAIRBOT), what if you want to make a trade outside of your home PC that doesn’t happen to have any platforms installed? Obviously, at the end of the day all we are doing is giving lay and back prices on the platform. So how do we do it on the Betfair website?

First of all, the important part. Trading on Betfair is not for someone who wants to place a number of trades with STOP LOSSES attached. Betfair DO NOT let you place STOP LOSSES on their site so this is yet another reason why traders use platforms. To keep it simple, using Betfair is recommended only for single trades, i.e. A LAY and A BACK or vice versa!

So let’s check out an example:

If you are using the Betfair Exchange NEW site, the following is how a market will look.

First thing to remember is when you are trading, DO NOT forget that you must be in the EXCHANGE part of Betfair (indicated in RED).The BLUE box shows how to get to the market.

Another point worth mentioning is that if there are streams available on TV, Betfair usually points this out as we can see from the YELLOW BOX.

Moving on…

So we’ve found the market on Betfair and we want to place a trade.

The above screenshot is the Wimbledon 2nd round match between Hewitt and Janowicz. At the moment, Janowicz is leading by 1 set and bearing in mind Hewitt was the initial favourite, we want to place a lay trade on Jano.

Let’s call the LAY ODDS for Jano as L.O. In this case, L.O is 1.62 (assume that the screenshot above has lay price of 1.62 instead of 1.61 as the price has moved briefly in the meantime). Now let’s assume we are laying for 3 units which means our L.S. or LAY STAKE would be 3. Also we have predicted that Jano odds is going to hit 2, so our BACK ODDS or B.O. = 2

To repeat that again, B.O. is the odds that we have predicted to rise and it is NOT the current Back Odds which 1.61.

Now we want to find our BACK STAKE or B.S. for equating a profit.

This is the formula for equating or Greening Out profits.

Back Odds * Back Stakes = Lay Odds * Lay Stakes

Or

B.O * B.S = L.O * L.S

If you wanna remember it easier, you may do it as BOBS = LOLS

Those abbreviations explained one more time:

B.O : Back Odds we are predicting to reach (Known)

L.O: Current Lay Odds (Known)

L.S: Known stake that we are planning to lay (Known)

B.S: Needed stake for backing (Unknown)

BEAR IN MIND THAT B.O. AND L.O. WILL BE KNOWN/UNKNOWN DEPENDING ON WHETHER YOU ARE BACKING OR LAYING FIRST.

IN THIS EXAMPLE, WE ARE LAYING, HENCE L.O. IS ‘KNOWN’.

With the above in mind, we proceed to find the corresponding back stake.

Let us write down everything that we know of, once more:

B.O. = 2 , L.O. = 1.62, L..S = 3, B.S. =

Therefore;

2 * B.S. = 1.62 * 3

B.S. = (1.62 * 3) / 2 = 2.42 approximately

So basically, if we want to equate a profit on both Jancowicz and Hewitt sides with a lay stake of 3 units, the back stake for the ‘predicted back odds of 2’ should be around 2.42 units.

The screenshot below from Fairbot clarifies this fact (Fairbot will calculate these figures for you) ..

As we can see, the profit accumulated is 0.57 units.

Ok so moving on, now that we have come to understand the staking side of things, how do we execute it on the Betfair site?

Here are the steps which are rather easy to learn:

Step 1:

Click on Lay 1.62 on Janowicz to activate the lay bets. The following box pops up on the right side of the screen:

Enter the stake of 3 units.

Step 2:

Clicking on PLACE BETS will now get this bet Matched and our overall profit/loss situation can be seen on the main market as follows:

It is worth noting that the main difference between the Betfair site and a normal lay on Fairbot is that Betfair takes account of their commission for every trade we give, which is why we see our profit potential as 2.85 units instead of 3.

Step 3: Enter our new Stake and Predicted odds or B.S and B.O

For this, click the Back Odds of 1.61 and change it manually to 2 and then enter the new stake as 2.42.

As soon as we enter the stake, we can see what is our Profit/Loss situation on the market from below:

Clicking PLACE BETS now will activate this bet but more importantly, we can see that it remains UNMATCHED as shown below.

Once the market is now ‘in-play’ again, and hopefully we are right on the odds on Janowicz shooting upwards, our unmatched bet gets matched and we are in with a profit of 0.55 units approximately.

As we can see the whole procedure is slightly more complex than executing things on Fairbot, however there are times when knowing the fundamentals can come to great aid, hence, this article is indeed dedicated to all kind of traders.

At the end of the day, a platform has its advantages which I will never deny. But if you ask me, I would argue that someone with a great intuition and a disciplined mind can equally crack markets on Betfair using just their website. The work is just that extra bit more tedious though!!

If you want to learn how to trade using Fairbot, please download the free ebook on the home page – it’s called Back Or Lay – A simple Guide to Tennis Trading and is proving very popular among traders..